Water and Peace

Water and Peace

For
clues to resolving the Middle East conflict, consider the case of the embattled
Dead Sea.

Headlines
in the Western press depict a seemingly hopeless cycle of violence in the
Israeli-Palestine sector of the Middle East. An Israeli warplane destroys the
home of a militant Palestinian. A retaliatory suicide bomber blows up an
Israeli bus. In both instances, innocent people die and the anger escalates.

Missing
from the media coverage is any clear sense of what is going on in the
day-to-day relationship between the two countries other than the sporadic
violent exchanges. Between the missiles and bombs, people are-under great
duress, and at great risk-continuing to trade services and goods, drive
cross-border trucks, commute through checkpoints to their jobs or schools-and
manage a range of transboundary natural resources that are essential to the
livelihoods of all the peoples in the region.

There's
a theory gaining adherents among some of the more thoughtful observers of this
troubled land, that it is in those essential day-to-day activities that the
real chance for achieving peace can be found. In the common resources essential
to all life, and especially in fresh water, the conflicting cultures share a
universal interest. Water is extremely scarce in this region and getting
scarcer. Human desperation is never greater than when water is no longer in
reach. If the people of this region can find viable ways of cooperating in the
management of this most valuable of all resources, there's no other challenge
they can't meet.

A
leading proponent of this theory is the grassroots group Friends of the Earth
Middle East (FoEME), an international NGO that has recently brought new
attention to one of history's most storied bodies of water-the Dead Sea.

The
Dead Sea is not fresh water. In fact, it is the saltiest large body of water on
the planet. But water is not a static asset, as the Earth's hydrological cycle
keeps its water moving through evaporation, rain, streams, and rivers before it
flows to the salty seas and begins the cycle again. Along the way, there are
subordinate cycles, both natural and man-made: the diversion of river water for
agriculture, industry, and household use; the dissemination into plants and
animals, as sap and blood. Water is a complex system, of which both freshwater
and salt are integral parts. While the water we drink is fresh, the blood it
forms is as salty as the sea. In the Middle East, the Dead Sea is the very
heart of the larger system. If people can learn to manage this sea as a system
rather than as a something to be plundered-so goes the theory-they've got a
good model for peacefully managing everything else.

by Gidon Bromberg

The name of the place is both accurate and misleading.
It's true that there are no fish in the Dead Sea, and that the surrounding
Judean Desert is bone-dry and hot. And that geographically, it is known as a
"terminal lake"-because it is where the Jordan River comes to its end. All that
might suggest a place of great desolation and morbidity. But the reality is
that the Dead Sea has been a place of abundant life-natural and human-since
prehistoric times. Its shores are dotted with springs and oases, which provide
water for 90 species of birds, 25 species of reptiles and amphibians, and 24
species of mammals, as well as more than 400 species of plants.

For
humans, it has been an important locale since the beginning of civilization,
and over the millennia it has become one of the most mythic and storied places
on Earth. Some say that where the River Jordan flows into the Dead Sea is the
place where Jesus Christ was baptized. It's where the biblical cities of Sodom
and Gomorrah are believed to have been located, although no evidence of them
remains. It's where the city of Jericho, believed to be the oldest continuously
inhabited city on Earth, still stands. It's where Masada, the fortress in which
Jews martyred themselves and their families rather than become slaves of the
Romans nearly 2,000 years ago, stands on a mountain overlooking the western shore.
And, of course, it's where the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest copy of biblical
texts, was found in a cave. It's an archeological mother lode.

Culturally,
the Dead Sea has been a place of importance to all three of the world's major
monotheistic religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Pilgrims still make
long treks to see Masada and the desert monasteries. So do tourists, who are
entranced by the spectacular scenery and the belief that the Dead Sea's
uniquely salty/mineral-rich water-10 times more salty than the ocean-contains
great healing qualities. Perhaps most important, given the conflict that
continues to rage between Israel and the Palestinians, the Dead Sea Basin is an
asset in which Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinians all have a common interest.
Like Solomon's baby, it brings out in each of them a greater willingness to be
reconciled to the others' claims on it than to let it die.

The
ancient functions of this basin are now endangered, however, in ways that put
such cooperation to a difficult test. Like the great Aral Sea of Central Asia,
the Dead Sea is drying up-and revealing an ugly side to its unique geography.
At about 417 meters below sea-level and falling, it is the lowest place on
Earth. While drainage is impossible, evaporation takes a steady toll. The
surface level has dropped by more than 25 meters (about the depth of a 10-story
elevator shaft) in the past four decades, and continues to drop by nearly a
meter per year. Its surface area has shrunk by a third or more since a measurement
was made at the beginning of the last century.

Does
it matter? To the tourism industry, it's a train wreck. There are 5,500 hotel
rooms in the Dead Sea Basin, and developers have been hoping to build 50,000
more. The resorts today provide 11,000 tourism-related jobs, and with the new
development that number could expand dramatically. For the struggling economy
of the Palestinians, those jobs could be a huge boon. But as the water level
falls, the hotels along the southern shores of this mythic place find themselves
trapped in an unhappy marriage with another industry.

The
Dead Sea is today two bodies of water-a deep northern lake and a smaller,
shallow southern one. The two bodies are separated by a land bridge, once a
peninsula, called El Lisan ("the tongue" in Arabic). The southern basin would
now be completely dry, except for the fact that it is the site of a huge potash
mining industry that has a stake in keeping the water there from disappearing
altogether. Because the Dead Sea is a terminal lake, it is where millions of
tons of sediment, carried down the Jordan ever since the Syria-African rift was
formed by a volcanic eruption about a million years ago, have come to rest.
Potash is highly valued as fertilizer, and it is extracted from the water by evaporation.
Other minerals extracted are bromides and magnesium. The mining operations have
facilitated the extraction process by turning the shallow southern basin into
rows of evaporation ponds demarcated by earthen walls, into which water is
pumped across the land bridge in order to maintain the water in the ponds at a
depth of about a meter.

For
a strip of resort hotels that were built along the southern shores over the
past half-century, the presence of the mining operations is a necessary evil;
without their continuous pumping of water from the north, there would be no
water for guests to bathe in-and they'd be left literally high and dry. The
tourism industry in Israel openly admits today that locating the hotels on the
evaporation ponds in the very south was a poorly conceived idea. But the
dilemma for the southern hotels is that as salt has built up at the bottom of
the evaporation ponds, the potash companies have had to raise the earth walls
of the ponds higher in order to keep the depth of the water at about 1 meter.
As a consequence, even as the water level in the main body to the north has
continued its fall, the level in the lower section has risen-causing flooding
to the foundations of some of the hotels. As a result, at least one of the
hotels that depend on the mines to bring water to the lower sea has now sued
the mines for doing just that.

Meanwhile,
on the main basin to the north, the falling of the water table has caused large
sinkholes to appear. Over a thousand holes now riddle the western shore
alone-some of them larger than a car. These holes can open up overnight, under
roads, buildings, parking lots, and wildlife reserves. The plans to expand
hotel capacity have had to be put on hold, as it is no longer safe to build.
And even where there are no cave-ins and where the super-saline water is deep
enough for a guest to sit back on the surface while reading a newspaper, there
is another potential peril. On the western shores, the declining water levels
have also exposed deep mud, making strolling along the shoreline outright
dangerous. In many places the mud is so thick that it acts like quicksand, with
little chance that anyone who sinks into it could escape without help.
Concerned about the legal ramifications of the sinkholes and the mud, the
Israeli authorities have now placed warning signs along the whole length of the
western shore.

After
its founding 10 years ago, Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME) began to
take a particular interest in the Dead Sea Basin. The group brought together
Jordanian, Palestinian, and Israeli environmentalists who were galvanized by
the unique natural wonders of this ancient sea-and by the alarm with which they
were watching its demise. An immediate concern of the group was the threat
posed by the Sea's decline to the several important wildlife refuges that ring
the Sea. These oases are unique biodiversity hotspots in the middle of a
desert, but the falling water table and proliferation of sinkholes threatened
to bring them to ruin.

FoEME also saw the Dead Sea Basin as an opportunity to
promote the idea of sustainable development in a region where modern economies
are on a collision course with growing water scarcity. It surmised that any
serious hope for sustainable development in turn depended on achieving a level
of cooperation that has been almost unheard of in this region of ancient
enmities.

To
facilitate such cooperation, FoEME reasoned that it was essential to forge a
common understanding of the real value of the Basin to the stakeholders-not
just the value of potash mining revenues and hotel receipts, but a range of
values that don't show up in conventional measures of GNP. For example, the
group wondered, what is the value of preserving a wildlife refuge or
archaeological site rather than let it be bulldozed for new roads or hotels? If
there were no comprehensive plan that took such value fully into account, it
could too easily be ignored by policymakers. If the ecological, recreational,
and cultural values were as visible as are the industrial ones, the priorities
for planning might be quite different. One visitor to the Dead Sea, questioned
during an FoEME survey, suggested that the emotional satisfactions of hiking or
bird-watching, for example, are "no less real than the more obvious economic benefits
of sectors such as agriculture and mineral extraction."

To
measure how important some of these often overlooked values might be to the
region's own quality of life, FoEME recently conducted a study1 of "willingness to pay" (WTP)-the amount of money each household would
be willing to contribute toward conservation and sustainable development of the
Basin. Remarkably, the study found that all three of the populations whose
lands adjoined the Dead Sea said they would be willing to pay substantial amounts
of their own money to establish a fund for this purpose. Israelis were willing
to pay, on average, $23.06 (U.S.) per household. Jordanians had a WTP of
$13.12. And even the Palestinians, who are struggling with poverty and
unemployment, had an average WTP of $9.48. Multiplied by the total numbers of
households in the region (1.8 million Israeli, 893,000 Jordanian, and 576,000
Palestinian), that came to over $59 million. FoEME concluded that "the economic
benefits to conservation are "at least in the tens of millions and possibly the
hundreds of millions of dollars per year."

Today,
FoEME sees the Dead Sea's decline as a reason to underscore not only that the
region's diverse industries, cultures, and environment all have great economic
value, but that they are highly interdependent-and thus mutually threatened.
"It's not only pilgrims and nature-lovers who are finding the land and water
literally pulled out from under their feet," says Munqeth Mehyar, FoEME's chair
and Jordanian director. The Jordan River water that feeds the Dead Sea is also
being used to irrigate farm crops and provide fresh water for industrial and
urban use upstream. In fact, 90 percent of the river's flow is being diverted
for those purposes, and as the downstream water falls to a trickle, there are
increased calls for more of the upstream water to be freed to follow its
original course. It's the upstream diversion that's the main cause of the Dead
Sea's decline, so agriculture and tourism have become competing sectors-with
little coordination between them. And as the Dead Sea falls, tensions are
rising. "Due to destructive development, uncoordinated planning between
governmental authorities, and unchecked competition between the various
economic sectors that exploit the Dead Sea's resources," says Nader Khateeb,
FoEME's Palestinian director, "we are nearing a point of no return."

FoEME
is not alone in regarding the Dead Sea's demise as a fast-closing window of
opportunity. The shriveling of the Sea has occurred in less than 75 years, as
more and more of the Jordan's flow has been diverted for agriculture. In the
1930s, the inflow of water from the Jordan was equal to the loss from
evaporation. In recent years, with most of the Jordan's flow diverted, planners
in both Israel and Jordan have envisioned replacing the Jordan's input by
transporting water from either the Mediterranean Sea or the Red Sea. In the
1970s, an Israeli group proposed digging a colossal canal from the
Mediterranean. The idea was not only to refill the Dead Sea but also to take
advantage of the more than 400-meter drop in elevation en route, to produce
hydroelectric power. A Jordanian group made a similar proposal, but with the
canal coming from the Red Sea instead of the Mediterranean. A 1996 study by a
Chicago-based engineering company suggested that water could be pumped from the
gulf of Aqaba to an altitude of 220 meters, whence it would go through a tunnel
in the Rift Valley Mountains for 200 kilometers before dropping through a
hydroelectiric plant, and perhaps a reverse-osmosis desalination plant as well,
on its way down to the Dead Sea. The idea of being able to restore lost water
to the Dead Sea while producing more fresh water for one of the world's most
water-scarce regions was hugely appealing. Neither the "Med-Dead" nor
"Red-Dead" canal has been built, however, in part because of the political
tensions that have crippled most transboundary planning in the region, and
partly because of the enormous cost of such a project. And environmentalists
have reservations about whether giant engineering projects are the right
approach at all. The history of water engineering projects is rife with
examples of technological hubris and miscalculation, from the channeling of the
Mississippi River to the Great Man-Made River through the Libyan desert. FoEME
notes that while a Med-Dead or Red-Dead project might stop the sinkholes and
stabilize groundwater, it raises new unanswered questions about how the mixing
of two seas, with completely different chemical compositions, would alter the
reputed therapeutic values of Dead Sea waters, the main attraction for tourists
in the first place. Moreover, even if the canal were to be approved tomorrow,
it would take 20 years or so for the water to be raised to its original level;
hence the need for a more comprehensive solution.

FoEME
is promoting the development of an integrated and coordinated plan2 for the whole region, balancing the needs of
all industrial and cultural stakeholders and guiding development in ways that
give maximum protection to the ecological assets of the region. A comprehensive
economic analysis, it suggests, would show that for the economy of the region
as a whole, greater net benefit would accrue from restoring most of the
Jordan's flow to the Dead Sea than from digging a huge canal. To arrest the
degradation, says FoEME, it is essential to have the Dead Sea declared a World
Heritage Site. Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinians have all expressed
interest, although political complications-particularly worries about how this
might impact other development plans-are holding up implementation. Meanwhile,
the Israeli government is funding research to determine options for
comprehensive rehabilitation, and Jordan has declared the health of the basin
to be a national priority issue.

While
the Dead Sea is unique, its problems are not. Outcries about the excessive
diversion of water from the Jordan River echo very similar complaints heard
along the downstream stretches of the Colorado and Nile Rivers, among others.
The competition between agriculture, with its huge thirst, and household use,
with its politically undeniable one, is worldwide. The tug-of-water between
human uses and the needs of the natural world is also increasingly felt
worldwide. The temptation to solve water distribution problems by building
gigantic, ill-conceived, and cost-overrunning infrastructure projects has been
repeated in hundreds of river basins. The geological instabilities caused by
falling water tables have been experienced in such diverse places as Mexico
City and northern China. The fragmentation of habitat is a problem almost
wherever there are people. The jurisdictional problems of a key bioregion that
spans national borders are seen along the Rio Grande River, the Great Lakes,
the Alps, and the Amazon.3

Also
not surprising, under the circumstances, are FoEME's proposed on-the-ground
recommendations. Upstream urban centers need to stop dumping raw waste into
water that people are paying good foreign exchange to bathe in. A carefully
determined balance needs to be struck between the needs for water extraction on
the river and the continued flow of at least some of the Jordan into the Dead
Sea. Land-use planning needs to stop the linear expansion of resort development
along the shoreline and protect substantial areas of shoreline as nature
reserves. The sites sought by pilgrims need to be protected from commercial
blight and environmental deterioration. The falling sea level needs to be
arrested and the water table stabilized so that people and buildings don't risk
tumbling into sinkholes.

In
short, Israel, Palestine, and Jordan all need to coordinate their management of
humanity's most valuable natural resource in ways that address not only their
own national needs but the competing needs of farmers and city-dwellers,
tourism and mining, and the visitors to Muslim, Jewish, and Christian holy
sites. Given the stalling of the Bush-Sharon "Road Map" for Israeli-Palestinian
peace, that might seem like daydreaming. But in fact, some of the envisioned
Dead Sea cooperation is already happening, in ways that aren't being seen in
other areas of conflict. Some of this laying of at least the groundwork for a
cooperative stabilization has to do with the immediacy of water-the fact that
neither humans nor birds can live for more than a few days without it, and
cannot wait through years of political posturing. In this sense, water is just
the leading edge of the Earth's resources overall, and the dry Middle East is
just one of the first regions being forced to decide between a higher level of
cooperation than in the past, and ever-larger repeats of the civilizational
catastrophes of the past.

According
to an old folk song, "the River Jordan flows deep and wide." But if the ancient
antagonisms of the Holy Land don't soon break out of their cycles of pre-modern
revenge and destruction, the Jordan will stop flowing altogether-and the Dead
Sea really will be dead. FoEME says that with reasonable cooperation between
neighbors, the Dead Sea can be very much alive. And if there's hope for that,
there's great hope for this troubled region's future.

Gidon
Bromberg is director of the Israeli office of Friends of the Earth Middle East.

Footnotes:

1 "An Economic Analysis of Different Water Uses Affecting
the Dead Sea Basin," Becker, Katz, Qumsieh, Mehyar, Hajeer, and Salinger, in
Katz, Bromberg, Khatib, and Sultan, eds., Advancing Conservation and
Sustainable Development of the Dead Sea Basin-Broadening the Debate on Economic
and Management Issues, FoEME, 2004. See www.foeme.org.

3 FoEME has registered the Dead Sea as a member lake of the
Living Lakes Network precisely to learn from the lessons of and share
experiences about other lakes and wetlands around the world. See www.livinglakes.org.